Commentary by Maximilian Ahrens, CTO, Zimory

There has been a lightning storm bringing parts of Amazon down (see here).

The question is: how can you avoid this - without building untenable worldwide distributed software. The answer is simple: multiple sites that are seamlessly connected (um, “real” cloud computing). If you have two sites available, the probability of lightning striking both sites at the same time is rather low. But the challenge is the seamless connectivity. You can have two compute sites, but starting up the workloads that were running on the site that was shut down is more complicated.

You need to have very efficient dispersed snapshot technologies to allow a failover of a recent state in a remote site. After all — isn’t that really the promise of cloud computing? Not a single mammoth Walmart (or, in this case, Amazon) data center, but a real distributed, “breathing” datacenter.

So, running a real multi-site cloud that creates added value with cold standby instances is not only building a overlay management layer, but also pretty tough technologies — but it can be done — and frankly, is being done.

• Lightning Knocks Out Amazon's Compute Cloud